I know I’ll be savaged for this, but I will NOT keep quiet about hypocrisy

ALMOST all recent developments in the people’s party have reminded me of what happened when I turned up at Harriet Harman’s summer thrash this year at Labour HQ in a brutalist tower block i n Westminster.

Left-wing writer Polly Toynbee (the great-granddaughter of an earl) went for me (the granddaughter of i mmigrants). She reminded me – I had deleted this from my memory as I do most unpleasantness – that during a recent debate with her and another Guardianista, George Monbiot, on ‘Who Rules Britain?’ I’d told the audience that Polly had sent her children to private school. She hadn’t liked it.

‘You went personal,’ she said over the Twiglets, as though my comment was below the belt. I gibbered my apology – she did have a point, plus I hate it when people are cross – but as we parted, Polly warned me pleasantly that the next time we did an event together, she would go for the jugular, too.

ITHINK that this anecdote explains a bit about why the New Red Dawn has been more of a drab Beige Spring so far. It’s because the personal IS political, yet if anyone klaxons any hypocrisy on the part of any Left-winger, they risk a Stalinist-style purging.

Take the case of ballsy female Labour MP Jess Phillips, who, at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party last week, dared to raise the tiny problem of the lack of women in the most senior Shadow Cabinet roles, only to be accused by Diane Abbott of being ‘sanctimonious’.

‘You’re not the only feminist in the PLP,’ snapped Abbott. Phillips told Abbott to ‘f*** off’. When asked what happened next, Phillips replied: ‘ She f****d off.’ In my view, this makes the brave new member for Birmingham Yardley the obvious leader-in-waiting when the inevitable comes to pass and JC is crucified by MPs. But more to the point, it underlines how hypocrisy is the party’s Achilles heel, and not money or sex (even though last week it emerged that Abbott and Jez We Can were at it, went on a Stasi-themed ‘holiday’ behind the Iron Curtain, and even romped naked in a field – thanks for the visual, Diane – all of which could explain her tigerish reaction to criticism of her new leader and old lover).

They say one thing in public and another in private. The examples are legion.

As I revealed in The Spectator several years ago, Tony and Cherie Blair took the credit for sending their children to the London Oratory, a state school, but had them tutored on the side by teachers from top private school Westminster.

Harriet Harman, who did a brilliant job as interim Labour leader (frankly the party should have begged her to stay on), sent her son to a grammar, while former Labour Education Secretary Ruth Kelly sent her son to a private school.

As it happens, I don’t blame them for wanting the best education in the world for their offspring, and advantages that other children from less welloff households could not afford. I have done the same myself.

No, what sticks in my craw as a social liberal who believes in market-based capitalism is that comrades-in-arms see no irony at all in the fact that they proclaim their support for Pikettian pre-distribution but also have villas in Umbria and buy their kids grad-pads.

Labour politicians and their supporters are happy to direct an endless stream of contemptuous superiority at the many who don’t match their elevated standards of doctrinal purity, but somehow, as soon as they are given opportunity to put their money where their mouth is, they fail to match their deeds to their worthy words.

NOBODY will remember in the long run that Jeremy and Diane were an item 40 years ago (oh, all right, it has left an indelible image in my mind). But it WILL be noted in perpetuity that Brother Jeremy failed to appoint any sisters to the great offices of state; that Abbott sent her son to City of London public school; and that Lord Falconer, the arch-Blairite, accepted a position in the Shadow Cabinet and patronage from a boss who loathes Blair and all his works.

For the moment, the narrative of the Beige Spring is that all Tories are poverty-denying ‘scum’ (that will change, of course, when the party realises that it needs to make friends and influence Conservative voters, too).

Tories may well indeed be ghastly – full of bounders and bores – but at least they don’t advertise their moral CVs for all to admire. In fact, they often do the opposite. When my brother Boris was asked about the cost of a pint of milk, he joked that he hadn’t a clue, but he DID know the price of a bottle of champagne.

Tories may be scum in the eyes of all the red-flag-flying Bollinger Bolsheviks, but at least no one could accuse us of being hypocritical scum.